In the past few weeks, I have convinced myself the poppies in my garden are at half-mast in honour of wahine toa I knew who have died recently.
There have been five deaths, including two grandmothers, two great-grandmothers and a friend’s sister. Three died too young despite reaching their three score years and ten.
Every morning, without letting on to my companion, who might think I have taken leave of my senses (again), I visit the poppies. I ask them when they are going to get on with the job.
The poppies’ buds dangle, like a sadness too heavy for their hairy necks to lift. I do not remember previously noticing how long this flower unfurling takes once the buds appear. That has not stopped my conviction it is taking much longer than usual.
I love poppies for their colours, and their deceptive delicacy. While their papery blooms look fragile, the plants have chutzpah and tenacity, and an ability to turn up and brighten our lives in spaces where you might least expect them.
In their own ways, the women I am grieving were all like that too.
Although my relationships with these women were not such that I will be feeling what Lorin Clarke calls Big Grief, I ache for those closer to them who will.
In her book about growing up with her father John Clarke (aka Fred Dagg), Would That Be Funny?, Lorin describes Big Grief as something that whips the bottom out of the world like a magician with a tablecloth.
She says it wakes before you every morning and lights up your entire nervous system.
"It’s confounding and surprising and huge and blinding. It shapeshifts through your life, leaping from photographs, haunting celebrations, drifting past as a scent on a Sunday walk. It fills the dark, sad moments and infects the good ones, too. Celebrations — birthdays, Christmases, anniversaries — are dreaded in inverse proportion to the joy they used to bring. Sometimes, grief comes disguised as a powerful rage ... ’’
As she says, before you have been through it, it is impossible to imagine yourself into the experience of all-encompassing grief.
Smaller grief might not see me sobbing unexpectedly (and dangerously) in the car when driving somewhere, but it can still sneak up on me and wield a quick stab when I am desperate to tell the dead one something or one of their favourite expressions pops into my mind.
I wonder what Lorin might call the sort of grief which happens when multiple members of your family, young and old, and friends from your wider community are killed in a senseless conflict. I cannot get my head around the enormity of that. Whatever side you are on, how does the rage at that unfairness ever leave you?
It makes me think of Randy Newman’s song Losing You. His inspiration for it was his oncologist brother telling him about a patient of his, a promising sportsman who died rapidly at 23 of brain cancer.
Forty years earlier, his parents’ families had been killed in extermination camps in Poland. They said they had been able to get over those deaths eventually but did not have time to get over this fresh tragedy.
This is how Randy put it in the song: "When you’re young/And there’s time/To forget the past/You don’t think that you will/But you do/But I know that I don’t have time enough/And I’ll never get over losing you.’’
As he says, it is a big idea.
For me, each new grief reminds me of old griefs, and I wonder if I live long enough whether I will run out of room to accommodate them all in my head.
In the midst of thinking about all this, I found my copy of Barbara Kingsolver’s collection of essays High Tide in Tucson. For years I thought I had lent it to someone who had not returned it, but there it was hiding in plain mess on my mantelpiece.
On page 15 I found this gem: "In my own worst seasons I’ve come back from the colourless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard for a long time at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again.’’
Yesterday, there were two glorious red poppies. I looked at them long and hard and hoped there would be more today.
■ Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
